Traditionally, equipment and products are known assets of an organization or government. For example, in a manufacturing facility of a newspaper printing company, the company may own lots of physical equipment for the printing process. From the paper feeding machines, to the inking machines, to the cutting and folding machines, all of the equipment account for different resources needed by the company. In addition, this equipment might be needed at different times.
Individual people are also resources of an organization or government. Similar to equipment, different people may be needed at different times for a particular project. For example, in constructing a building, an architect and supervisor may be needed on hand throughout the entire project, while specific laborers, such as electricians, plumbers, and interior designers, may not be needed but for specific times. As such, it would not be beneficial to pay an individual to be present at all times if he/she is not involved in the project at most or many times.
For a large organization with hundreds of people and many projects occurring over different times, it can be difficult to balance resource demands across the projects. For example, a Chief Information Officer of an organization may have over 700 total resources of people with varying skills and abilities that work for the organization. Each individual manager under the CIO may keep coming back saying that he/she does not have enough resources. The CIO must figure out the number of resources adequate to assist the manager based on funding and whether the organization has the right resources to assist.
Standard industry models exist in an attempt to assist a CIO or other individual to know properly how to allocate people as resources on various projects. The Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO II) is a model that allows one to estimate the cost, effort, and schedule when planning a new software development activity. Similarly, Caper Jones Research of organizations at Capability Maturation Model (CMM) Level 3 provides recommendations for target efforts allocations by role, and Software Evaluation and Estimation of Resources-Software Estimating Model (SEER-SEM), a software project estimation model widely used within defense, military/aerospace, government, and Information Technology (banking, finance, insurance and other enterprises) worldwide, are other industry known models.
However, these models operate on a static level, where only a specific point in time may be viewed. In today's industry, many variables change and shift the resource demand capacity on a project. A need exists to account for these variables in order to have a fluid mechanism allowing an individual to see different scenarios for resource demand and changes during a project's life cycle as well as to balance capacity with demand across a portfolio of projects.